INTRODUCING NMAP
Almost 10 years have passed since the infamous ‘Learn to Hack’ feature got us in trouble with Barnes & Noble, but just in case let’s start with a warning. The word “hacking” has unfortunately been co-opted by the media and entertainment industries, where it’s repeatedly used to denote any and all illegal activities done on a computer. The traditional (and correct!) usage refers to much more honourable pastimes: tinkering, reimagining and making machines behave in a way other than how they were designed to behave.
Parrot comes with a handy GUI front-end that saves you learning (at least until the next page) Nmap’s lengthy command line syntax. You’ll find it under Pentesting >Information Gathering>Nmapsi4. There’s an option to run it as root, but don’t worry about that for now.
Wait, that wasn’t a warning. This is though: whatever you learn in this feature, be aware that inappropriate use of computers can land you in a lot of trouble. Some of the tools featured here can do real damage. It’s also simple for a skilled defender to detect their use, trace your IP address and alert the authorities. There are skills and tricks to not getting caught and we’re not going to teach you them. So please keep all your break-in attempts, covert reconnaissance and Bobby’ DROP TABLES-style SQL injections restricted to your own infrastructure. There’s a lot to learn from poking around your home network. Who knows, maybe you’ll discover a misconfiguration or even a vulnerability in your router, or a Raspberry Pi accidentally left exposed to the world.